Manic Wire
Do you like my braids? Pinterest taught me.
Curls come tumbling.
I have a room just for this. Night terrors and vanity.
Pigeons, rroux rroux.
Rroux, rroux. It sounds like American poets.
Sounds like opaque familiarity.
Words can be barriers to define self, concisely.
Call me modal (a helping verb): domestic, gullible.
Or fierce. Woo me. Count me among the wombed
wombing. Periodically cocooning.
Time flattens.
Medication insulates the raw copper wire.
Do something about heavy doorways.
Push or something.
Curtains could be plusher, tender.
Fear the slender monster where the waves
part ways.
Light.
Keep out light
-hearted nurses with their blue
triage forms.
Scratchy upholstering.
Too many beeps to calm down.
What is it to have this body?
High, a ceiling light,
or a spent weapon, holstered.
Exoskeleton
A grasshopper thuds in flight: my scapula.
My shoulder aches thanks to pavement’s pull.
My tibia: a mongoose hiding in all this flesh,
hoarding eggs. My throat: a highway, surging.
So why can’t I speak? The warm bath
of time floats around me, cooling.
I am always leaving: the being beyond the word.
My kneecaps are heartbeats, hibernating bears.
Phalanges: fish spines laid out along a sandy lake.
Blood clots run through me monthly
like so many blackberries. Firefly children
test the word mother before I wake.
Smother fire before it burns the curtains. An abyss
beyond that word’s promise: mother. Parent?
What about platelet? Or blood not mixed, or bones
not formed? What shaky instrument do I have
with which to prolong life: hips? That’s it?
Hysterosonogram
I have seen three perinatal psychiatrists
this month; each one’s advice
goes against the others’
and everything I’ve been warned about
for a decade.
Their questions of my history make me
red with light inside. It aches.
I wear a sheet while the doctor
inserts a catheter, balloon.
On the monitor my uterus: a planet
where hurt is the mother tongue.
Light skidding over valleys and ridges: a site
resistant to damage.
Light blipping over ova and striated flesh:
pomegranate gems.
Afterward, a neighbourhood walk.
The five p.m. sun will slick
eavestroughs golden, starburst windows.
I will bring my face into the flares
above the hard snow,
my body booming
with old griefs.
I was told there would be pain.
It’s not the pain I remember.
The pain I remember hooks like light
through an open stitch.
Ahead, in the sky, a percussion of pigeons.
Ahead, in the street, a leashed dog.
Excerpt from Ajar © 2025 by Margo LaPierre. Reprinted by permission of Guernica Editions.
Ajar by Margo LaPierre, published by Guernica Editions (October 31, 2025)
More about Ajar:
The poems in Ajar navigate the physical and psychological dangers of womanhood through the flattening lens of mood disorder. Psychosis isn’t the opposite of reality—it’s another perceptual system. If neurotypical thought measures the world in centimetres, this collection measures it in inches, gallons, amperes. Ajar celebrates radical recovery from gendered violence and psychotic paradigm shifts, approaching madness through prismatic inquiry. As time converges within us, we find new ways to heal and grow. From the emergency room to the pharmacy to the fertility clinic to the dis/comfort of home and memory, this collection humanizes bipolar psychosis.
Margo LaPierre (Photo credit: Curtis Perry)
More about Margo LaPierre:
Margo LaPierre is a writer and freelance literary editor. With multi-genre work published in The Ex-Puritan, CV2, Room, PRISM, and Arc, among others, she has won national awards for her poetry, fiction, and editing. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC. Ajar is her second poetry collection.